Get On, Clip In, Fall Off

Conference time

I'm taking a couple of days off from trying to write documentation to visit SANE 2004 in Amsterdam. This is one of the biggest conferences in Europe for UNIX geeks, and after being here in 2002 I've been looking forward to the 2004 incarnation of the conference. The big difference this time is that I have to pay for it myself (although hey, it's tax-deductible), but it's still very much worth the investment.

I arrived yesterday afternoon (after a morning spent with that sinking feeling which appears when you know you're going to have to go to Heathrow airport shortly) and, after finding the hotel and checking in, ran down to the RAI congress centre where the conference is being held to pick up my registration stuff from the desk. The T-shirt this year has an "I, Root" theme which is slightly more subtle than the T-shirt from last time, which has "I (heart) ROOT" on the front in huge letters and which I reserve for when I'm going somewhere where there will be Australians. After saying hi to a couple of people I ran back again, for a total of just over five miles. My calf muscles are still reminding me of this this morning.

Owing to a bit of time zone confusion this morning (the iCal entries for the programme were converted to UK time) I arrived about half an hour early thinking I was late. I guess I should have figured out that 0830 would be an insanely early time to kick off an event full of computer geeks, something which I put down to having slept badly last night, but I got to spend some time wandering round the Internet before the event proper began. After the usual introductions and welcomes, Paul Kilmartin of little-known e-commerce startup eBay delivered the Thursday morning keynote - Inside eBay.com: The System Administrator's Perspective.

It was interesting to see how eBay have coped with their absurdly huge rate of growth - from something like six peanuts sold in 1995 to twenty-six billion trillion dollars' worth of merchandise sold last Tuesday alone and now turning over more dollars than there are atoms in the universe - and how they've had to modify their thinking and design philosophy to cope both with this huge growth rate and the constantly-changing technology that supports it.

Interesting, sure, but from my point of view fairly alien - as most of my experience has been in penniless academia, the first thing that sprung to mind was that yes, if you've got the money and your budget is tending towards infinity then you can just shout at your vendors until they deliver the stuff you want to solve your problem. For the rest of us, however, budget is usually the primary limiting factor rather than the hardware that's available on the market, and it's a sad fact of life that the amount of attention your vendor support people pay to you is usually proportional to how important a customer you're considered to be.

After a bit more time spent playing with computers I returned to the hall for Wietse Venema's invited talk - Open Source Security Lessons. Wietse is one of the most authoritative and worth-listening-to people out there when it comes to computer security - among other things he's the man behind numerous tools including tcp-wrappers, Postfix, SATAN... and so on.

Wietse presented an interesting overview of some of the lessons learned over the years, possibly the most important of which from my point of view was:

"If your resources are limited you have to be creative"

Of course, most peoples' resources are limited, which means that this talk worked as an interesting counterpart to the keynote. It's fantastic if your resources are unlimited (well, practically unlimited), but for most people creativity is going to be what solves problems.

Another lesson learned from Postfix which was close to my heart was that:
"Spammers don't destroy the infrastructure, it's the well-meaning people with poorly designed countermeasures"

which is, as Wietse says, just another way of saying that SPF is evil. And this is just one way in which it's evil.

(Incidentally, during the talk Wietse had to pause while his radio mic was seen to, and afterwards restarted the talk speaking Dutch rather than English, causing me to have one of those "Urk, my brain's lost the ability to parse English" moments that happen when people around me suddenly start speaking Dutch. Reboot!)

Posted by mpk at September 30, 2004 11:30 AM | TrackBack